RE/SEARCH #6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook HARDBACK

Hardback only. Only 1000 made, on superior glossy paper! Purple endpapers! Future rare collectible. The photos are infinitely sharper on the new glossy paper. The new hardback looks like a brand new book! This edition is superior to (and supersedes) all old printings offered elsewhere on the Internet.

“…really a game changer, one of the most inspirational books I read. Much loved.” — Jack Sargeant, writer.

“Packed with fascinating material, and as always beautifully produced and designed. A real insight into what links these artists and their obsessions.” — J.G. Ballard

GENESIS P-ORRIDGE: When we shifted from Coum Transmissions to TG, we were also stating that we wanted to go into popular culture, away from the art gallery context, and show that the same techniques that had been made to operate in that system could work. We wanted to test it out in the real world, or nearer to the real world, at a more street level–with young kids who had no education in art perception, who came along and either empathized or didn’t; either liked the noise or didn’t.

A little mini-Dada movement, eh?

RE/SEARCH: Possibly, with the power to affect people lacking a sophisticated art background.

GEN: Well, that’s something we’ve always tried to do. Now we’re going to try and do that with a sort of philosophical, mystical magick, so non-dogmatic and non-authorative–people who’ve been brought up to despise anything that smacks of “religion”–maybe we can remind them that there are useful structures; that spiritual values aren’t necessarily to be despised or ridiculed; that there are certain individual attentions which, when used in a mystical way, actually are quite beneficial.

I’d like to be able to present whatever we do so that somebody with no training can get into it as easily as somebody with training. Quite often it is the people without training who get into it quicker. And often it is the people with training who are most antagonistic. And to do it without simplifying it, without taking any of its power away, so that you’re not being patronizing–you’re merely trying to take away the mystique and the vested interest in trying to sound like you’ve got to be special to understand this. It doesn’t have to be a bastardized version to be understood by a lot of people. I’d like to try and find a form that treats everybody as being intelligent, at least potentially . . . . You assume initially that people want a bit more content, some project which has a lot more depth to it, and that the fact that everyone says “Oh, everyone just wants trivia and superficiality” isn’t true. People are actually pleased to be given a bit more credit for a bit more intelligence. I think it’s far better to make something on the assumption that people will work to understand it . . .

And, there’s no fun if there isn’t risk. . . Sometimes I think we’ve given birth to a monster, uncontrollable, thrashing, spewing forth mentions of Auschwitz for no reason. It’s funny, because when I really think about it, the original half-dozen who started it all off are still the best ones, like the Cabs and Boyd–the first wave. I suppose that’s inevitable. It’s the old story, like in the 60’s–Zappa was completely different to Beefheart, who was completely different to the Doors, who were completely different to the Velvet Underground. And we were completely different to the Cabs, really. And Boyd Rice was totally different, and Z’ev is different. Monte’s different in his way. And we’ve all got quite a clear individual style linked to our individual lives. Whereas now they all sound like each other, and more than each other they sound like weedy fragments that they’ve honed in on, of one or the other people. The way they can even not noticed that everyone one of the original industrial groups and people was totally different from each other–they’ve even missed that fact. . .

Industrial Culture Handbook Excerpt: Mark Pauline

R/S: How did you blow apart your right hand?

Mark Pauline: I was preparing a rocket motor for a show. I had a pretty good instruction manual, and was finishing one of the processing stages which involved mixing the propellant, casting it, and then removing the mandrill which is a cylinder of metal that you put down the center of the propellant—you have to take that out after it cures. I’d tested the propellant by hitting it with a sledge hammer—it didn’t seem too sensitive. To get this rod out of the center, I thought I’d tap it with a hammer. I went outside, made a little wooden dowel to fit on top of it, and started tapping on the dowel with a hammer. Then it got stuck, and I said, Oh fuck, and then I hit it a little harder, and it moved some. Then I hit it again, and it just blew up, and it really blew up—blew me back about 2 or 3 feet away. I looked up and I was laying on the ground and blood just went in a sheet of red over my eyes. And then I shook it out of my eyes and looked at my hand, ’cause my hand felt funny, and all I could see was just the bones on my hand; there was no skin on any of the bones. Then they took me to the hospital and put me out and that was it.

None of the shrapnel hit me, so all I lost was a few fingers. More than anything I had lost time—all that time spent in the hospital, having to learn to work again with one hand. I had to think about what kind of state I was in that allowed that to happen. I don’t really consider it an accident, it was just a stupid mistake. Why do you do things that are really dumb? You just get in a funny mood and these things start to happen….

In terms of microsurgery, it turns out that some of the best surgeons are in San Francisco General Hospital just two blocks from my house. Over a period of 7 or 8 months they’re in the process of assembling what they can of my hand, to give me the basic functions: to pinch, to grasp. Those type of operations are basically experimental. They’ve done a real good job. It’s still hard to climb fences; it’s hard to carry five-gallon buckets, you know. But it didn’t take as long as I thought it would to be able to do things again. Like, I drove my motorcycle over here.

R/S: The last time I saw you, you were pretty worried about how you’d make money.

MP: Yeah, but then I got all these jobs and I just had to do them. So I guess I decided that I could do it. I was just having self-pity for myself when I talked to you. But you can’t do anything when you think those things—that’s a mental handicap.

I worry about having accidents. I don’t want to have any more accidents, but I’ve always really worried about accidents. I’ve always spent a lot of time thinking about all the awful things that could happen to me-I thought about it all the time. I either thought about doing awful things to other people, or the awful things that could happen to me. Every day I spent about an hour thinking about that, for years, ever since I was 7 or 8. You know, the things you daydream about—well, that was the 2 things I daydreamed about.

Now that I’ve had an accident, I still worry about things like that. But I never had an accident before, I never got hurt before, ever, in any way. I never got sick. I almost got hurt hundreds of times but nothing ever happened to me, it was just almost. It was just always a close call—more exciting than anything else.

But after it happens to you, it just teaches you that some things really are dangerous, and some things aren’t. It doesn’t mean that you can’t do the same things that you did before, you just have to know that there are better ways to do things, to keep yourself from getting surprises. But how you can think about: How am I going to avoid having a bad thing happen to me? It’s really stupid to spend a lot of time thinking about that. You don’t prevent those kind of things, you just don’t let them happen.

Industrial Culture Handbook Excerpt: Cabaret Voltaire

STEPHEN “MAL” MALLINDER: . . . The basic inspiration or philosophy is that we’re primitive, but primitive in an urban way—also primitive in our fascination with the ethnic primitive as well. I’m not saying we’re an ethnic group, but we’re aware (like in the Jajouka musicians) of that primitive force that goes through all of us. Instead of emulating ethnic primitivism we’re modern primitives. I don’t think we contrive ourselves to be that way, I think that’s basically what we are—I think that’s in us. We don’t have a propaganda, we don’t say this is what we’re trying to interpret, this is what we are. To us, the way we work is very natural and the way we feel music is instinctive. Whether we try and make it commercial or whether we try and make it weird, the whole point is that it’s instinctive, and in that sense I think we’re primitive.

R/S: Trust yourself! I think it’s admirable to remain in Sheffield, away from the supposedly advantageous distractions that London offers.

MAL: It’s still close, but people aren’t going to be dropping in on us. It allows us our identity. One disadvantage of London is that it can get very incestuous, full of wheelings and dealings, and that’s what we don’t want. Much as we feel a great affinity with a lot of people in London, our greatest affinity is with ourselves! For a group in our position it would be slightly easy to get engrossed in the superficial side—

RICHARD KIRK: We’re bullshit fighters!

R/S: —and on the fashion side—

MAL: I think we’re getting a bit too old to be fashionable now!

R/S: How do you think the videotapes you’ve collected reflect you? What are some of the titles?

RICHARD: We don’t want to get prosecuted for having too many bootlegs! Everything from Clockwork Orange to Taxi Driver to Midnight Express. Also real trash sci-fi and trash horror.

MAL: And European films like Aguirre and Fitzcaraldo which are still fascinating. You’ve got your kitsch American films for the trash element, and European ones for the subtlety. I mean, you need a bit of everything!

People’s approach to video is so hampered in a lot of ways—the whole idea of the music business promo video we find annoying. We haven’t produced a perfect video, but we’ve given some idea (just a sketch) of an alternative. And now we’ve started Double Vision which is not just an outlet for Cabaret Voltaire videos; we want it to be a total alternative video label which will bring out films and performance which might not be mass-marketable (but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be available). Where if we don’t do it, there’s a fair chance no one will. But the label has to be self-supporting. We want to make sure it’s quite flexible—some videos we might get an order for 100 straight off, and other videos might only sell a total of 12.

R/S: What have you read lately? Besides the new William Burroughs Reader?

RICHARD: I just read Andy Warhol’s From A to B and Back Again. Before then I was reading Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. Before that I read Cities of the Red Night when I was in the hospital. I had an appendix taken out 2 weeks after I came back from Japan.

MAL: I just read a really good book, Through a Black Sun, by a Japanese journalist who was in Vietnam from ’64-65. Before that I read Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti.

RICHARD: I have a lot of books on military psychology which I pick up from time to time and read. I go through phases where I don’t read anything at all, and then I’ll have a total fit of reading for a few weeks.

MAL: I think reading should be a natural process. I think there’s a certain elitist attitude where you feel obliged to have a certain amount of intellectual intake, which is very bourgeois. But reading should be something you do which you enjoy—you shouldn’t feel obliged to take in this written data just for the sake of it, just to store up the knowledge. It takes me 2 weeks to read a book—I’m permanently reading, but I don’t read 4 books a week and constantly feel, ‘Oh I must get that,’ because then you become just like a record collector. I think reading should be enjoyable and natural and something that you use—if you read 1 book and you use it for the rest of your life, that’s greater than reading a book a week that’s just there, of no use whatsoever to you.

RICHARD: I keep loads of books around for reference, so I can pick up a book and read maybe 2 chapters of it . . . And go back to certain books every now and then and pick out certain things that crop up in a conversation or film or anything. I prefer to do it on that basis a lot of the time.

R/S: It makes sense to have information potentially accessible, so that if you do get curious about a topic, you can quickly look it up. Most people who don’t read are forced to read—advertisements! And people who do read usually read what the reviewers select for them—they never bother to search out what might truly appeal to their own desires. If you’re rebellious enough, you usually do find those weird books that do change your life and are off the beaten path; that really become influences.